It's Always More Complicated

Firstly:

So, farewell then, PSC, whose advice to the sexually-bothered (rather than the lovelorn) has so oft provided fodder to oursinial musings. Guardian G2 today includes 23 of the best Sexual Healing columns

Not sure if they are The Greatest Hits rather than molto tipico of the kind of thing she addressed: in particular we note (as she stresses in the interview about the lessons learnt over 10 years of agony-aunting):

The female orgasm is still a mystery to some people
I’m still getting questions that show me people continue to think that the only “correct” type of female orgasm is one that’s purely vaginal and doesn’t involve the clitoris. For people to still think that, or to have that as the ideal, is extraordinary, but there it is. They just haven’t had the education to understand otherwise.

We also note the recurrent MenZ B Terribly Poor Stuff theme, what with the one who appears to regard his wife's bisexuality as a USP meaning *3SOMES* and two or three where one feels she did not interrogate sufficiently whether the male querent was actually gratifying his female partner before offering reassurance/solution e.g. 'My stunning wife makes no effort with our sex life' where we should like to know precisely what effort he is putting in, ahem.

However, there are also some of the wilder shores there.

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Secondly, and could we have a big AWWWW for this: David Attenborough seeks out London’s hidden wildlife:

Filming the wildlife of London requires an intrepid, agile presenter, willing to lie on damp grass after dark to encounter hedgehogs, scale heights to hold a peregrine falcon chick, and stake out a Tottenham allotment to get within touching distance of wary wild foxes.
Step forward Sir David Attenborough, who spent his 100th summer seeking out the hidden nature of his home city for an unusually personal and intimate BBC documentary.

Do we think this trip is doomed already???

My best friend Kady and I are planning a backpacking trip around south-east Asia in a few months and I have proposed the idea of us getting matching tattoos:

We’re both 20, and I think we’ll look back on them when we’re older and remember what a fun life we’ve lived. Tattoos are a reminder of a particular time, and I want to cherish our youth. I’ve found a cool tattoo parlour in northern Thailand, where we’ll be staying. I’ve seen videos of people having great experiences there and the tattoo artist is really talented.... It’s not like I want to get a random tattoo. I’m quite creative and have already started sketching ideas that represent who Kady and I are.

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In other gruesome news, okay, it is not one bloke spreading his seed to 100s, but I'm not actually sure that 'a worldwide limit of 75 families for each sperm donor' as applied by the European Sperm Bank isn't somewhat on the high side, even when it doesn't turn out further down the line with more sophisticated testing that a donor has a rare cancer-causing mutation.

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And this is sad, rather than gruesome, and makes me wonder about the whole marketing of the 'freezing eggs' thing as 'a groundbreaking act of empowerment', especially as it hasn't turned out like that:

I did not anticipate the emotional landscape that I would face a decade later, as a scientific intervention became a personal meditation on time, money, and unfulfilled dreams.

This week's You Be The Judge column in Guardian Saturday: My dad wants to track my location on his phone. Should he leave me alone?:

My dad and I disagree about whether he should follow me on the Find My Friends phone app, which lets you track people in real time. He used to, but when I went to university I removed him as a follower. I don’t think he needs to know where I am all the time.
I’m 27 now, but it’s still a bone of contention. Dad says I don’t call him enough – I think that’s why he’s being so persistent about being re-added. He says: “I would know what you were up to if you let me follow you on Find My Friends.”
But I don’t want him tracking me, as he used to take it too far when I was younger. Once, when I was in a coffee shop, he texted me saying: “Hope you enjoy your coffee.” It’s nosy and I felt like I was under surveillance. It was funny for a bit, but then I thought: how often is he looking? That sort of thing happened several times as a teenager.

But honestly. She's just going about her usual normal daily business. We think Father needs to get a hobby, and to reconsider the claim that 'it’s not stalking, it’s love' (surely what all stalkers think/say?).

Am having visions of Victorian Papas putting Airtags in daughters' crinolines.... wouldn't they have been all over it, eh?

(Or, I am over here, paging Lorelei Lee:

Welcome to the femosphere, the latest dark, toxic corner of the internet… for women:

“Ideas like men are the gatekeeper of relationships and women are the gatekeepers of sex,” she said.
“So women’s currency in the sexual marketplace resides in her withholding sex from men, and you diminish your value if you have casual sex.”
Or the idea that, to counter women’s lesser earning power (the gender pay gap in the UK was 14.3% last year), rather than fighting for pay equality, a man should provide for a woman financially, and women must “embrace feminine energy” to secure a husband. Kay said: “It’s incredibly conservative, but it’s trying to reframe it as being this empowering strategy.”

Which was pretty much an update, I guess, on the 'golddigger' model that LL had been presenting.

I'm not sure Helen Gurley Brown and Sex and the Single Girl etc really fitted that model, because it was more about making sure the Single Girl made her own dough - which might lead to a position where she got her pick of A Better Class of Bloke when she got round to considering Mattermoney, but that wasn't really the endgame.

And of course, how far this is really A Thing, is maybe questionable.

Couple of pieces in today's Guardian and okay, journalism, and soundbitey, and clickbait, etc etc etc

Be more vulnerable!’ What women can teach men about friendship – and what they can learn from men

I was thinking this didn't particularly reflect the way I communicate with my lady-friends, which tends to lean more to subjects of common interest/gossip/etc rather than being deep and emotional and sharing vulnerability, which may, I contend, have to do with the fact that, hello, we are no longer young things?

And what is this thing this thing is about relationship hierarchies? We are no longer in high school, hello, if we ever were.

On the 'sharing' thing sometimes this is just not that reciprocal: looking back at Q and painful friendship rupture, and her claim that I had been having a lovely life and just bitching about certain work things while her marriage had been breaking up, my recollection is that I had been doing a lot of listening to her marital woes and not actually mentioning death and illness in my family, partner being unemployed, etc? (Okay, if the world can be divided into Ancient Mariners and Wedding Guests, I am the latter.)

We observe that the author of that column has a book to promote.

And on books and reading and the current PANIC: How to put your phone down and get back into habit of reading books.

Query: has there ever been a time when more than half the population regularly read for pleasure? I am always dubious of stats like that and wonder if Mass Observation ever undertook surveys into reading among the populace.

I am also going to distrust any WO WO UNTO THE PRESENT GENERAYSHUN emanating from a quote by one superannuated Oxford prof.

Plus, presumably dealing with a population of students with a lot of other things on their mind, far more than I had in the halcyon days when I was a student with a full grant and a remarkable, it now seems, lack of pressure compared to These Here Dayz.

I also point out the contradiction between 'read physical books! take notes!' and 'reading should not be a chore'.

But I do realise as someone who is more somebody who counts as a reading addict than one of these people that has to have pushers inculcating the habit, I may be something of an outlier here?

Am pissed off with Goodreads, which - or possibly it is some Amazon bot which is doing this - is totally inconsistently doing Weird Stuff to the information pertaining to the Clorindaverse books which I carefully manually input myself at time of publication and which is now being messed up.

I.e. existence of ebooks being disappeared (2 editions being listed rather than 3) - cover image not showing up - and something having ingested all the ISBN info into the Kindle entry so I cannot re-input that into a new ebook entry (I was wont to do this and just have the ASIN for the Kindle entry) - also having to delete whatever it is image the system thinks has been uploaded for the cover and re-uploading the perfectly good one that was already there.

And why this has happened to some volumes in this extensive saga and not others, who can say.

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In other news today, some random passing thorts:

If this is what he thinks, a) he has not been reading the right kind of science fiction, has he, because there is a fairly long tradition of This Is A Very Disturbing Idea (e.g. David Karp, One) and b) it does explains why he can get behind AI reducing art and all creativity into gloop:

“I think we are moving to a world in which we all become cells in a single organism,” Zuckerberg replied, “where we can communicate automatically and can all work together seamlessly.”

Maybe I am interrogating this from the wrong perspective, but reading this: I’m married to a man but have erotic infatuations with women on television, I was going to myself, really, duckie, why don't you just write fanfic to get it out of your system?

‘I thought of the church as a friend and it slapped me in the face’: historian Diarmaid MacCulloch on the Church of England’s hypocrisy

For the past four years, since his retirement from university teaching, he has applied that lifelong erudition to a comprehensive and richly entertaining history of the ways in which, for 3,000 years, the church has tied itself in knots over sex (and love and marriage).

MacCulloch asked the classics professor Helen King to read his book pre-publication. King is just publishing a book on women’s bodies through the ages. “She said lots of complimentary things,” he says, “but felt there was a major omission: I hadn’t mentioned the clitoris much.”
“I was embarrassed,” MacCulloch says, “to realise that was true.”

Wow, this is terrifying: Like Jay Gatsby, He Threw Parties to Get Her Attention. It Finally Worked.:

Mr. Quintero first noticed Ms. Babai in a mutual friend’s Instagram story in 2016, when he was a freshman at Quinnipiac University and she was a freshman at the State University of New York at Albany. He asked that friend, Janice Murphy, for an introduction, but it would take four years for that moment to come. So Mr. Quintero, who became affectionately known as “Gatsby” among Ms. Babai’s friends, began hosting lavish gatherings in hopes of meeting her.

Mr. Quintero found ways to stay in touch. Most notably, he had Ms. Babai introduce him to her boss, Joseph Calabrese, the owner of a lighting design and fencing company, to talk about opportunities to work with his business, Quintero Enterprises. “Little did I know at the time, this was just another step to get closer to me,” said Ms. Babai, who coordinated their phone calls and joined business dinners.

Mr. Quintero wanted to do something “big,” he said, for the proposal in October 2023, so he rented out Barclays Center and convinced Ms. Babai to join him for what he said was an awards ceremony for women in business. As Ms. Babai entered the empty arena, she was greeted by pictures of them together on jumbotrons, flowers and a group of singers performing “Say Yes to Heaven” by Lana Del Rey. As Mr. Quintero got down on one knee, he said, “I have been waiting for this moment since the day I met you.”

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Anthony Comstock arrived in Washington, D.C., in January 1873 with a collection of pornography and big plans for what to do with it.
Alas, it was not to engage in trade with it.

Bearing a veritable grab bag of explicit images, books, pamphlets, contraceptives, and sex toys that he had ordered expressly for the purposes of shock, he set up displays, first in the private homes of legislators and then in the office of the vice president inside the congressional building.As congressmen trooped by to gawk, Comstock spoke to them about the “nefarious business” of obscenity.

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I feel I've heard of this, er, colourful character before, but I can't quite place them: Charlotte Bach (born Karoly Hajdu; 1920–1981) was a Hungarian-British impostor and fringe evolutionary theorist.L 'Her alternative theory of evolution acquired a cult following among prominent writers and scientists in London during the 1970s, who remained ignorant of her original identity until after her death.'

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More fun insights from The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure: Why were Hansel and Gretel not English?:

These types of stories about hunger and famine abound in the folklore of most European societies, and embody folk memories of food scarcity. However, as the historian John Walter noted, these tropes are curiously absent from English fairy tales. Why?
Walter speculated that this reflected the exceptionally early disappearance of famine from England, centuries before the risk of famine had subsided in the rest of Europe. Famine remained a threat in most of Europe until the mid-18th century, and persisted in some areas into the 19th century and even the 20th century, especially in association with war. In England, on the other hand, the last national famine occurred in the 1590s, and the last regional famine in the 1620s.

I mean, isn't life full enough of these already, sigh?

Personally I think this must just be one manifestation of Phil being one of those people whose puppy-dog desire to be Little Friend of All The World lacks any consideration for his actual nearest and dearest, their inclinations, their time and energy, etc:

You be the judge: should my boyfriend let the neighbours have keys to our garden?

They've barely even moved in; they hardly know these people; and he's going 'whoa! our garden is Liberty Hall!'

Also are we just a leeetle suspicious that upstairs neighbour claims that previous resident was happy to hand out keys to the garden? Hmmmmmm. The next thing you know, upstairs neighbour and her offspring are holding parties there.

And in further ick: I’m off on holiday - but who knows where? Will my ‘mystery travel’ experiment end in delight or disappointment?

Okay, I can get fraught up enough even with a meticulously planned and angsted-over itinerary over All The Things That Might Go Wrong, and perhaps I am now Too Old and Set In My Ways for this kind of spontaneity.

But honestly, while she was actually there, didn't she at least do some looking about for local attractions and come across the famed Therme spa?

Among the issues addressed by that invaluable enterprise, The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Mrs Man: Why do women take their husbands’ surnames?:

It was never mandatory in England for a woman to take her husband’s surname. There are historic cases of married women retaining their birth name as a professional name. Ann Fisher (1719-78), the daughter of a Northumberland yeoman, wrote books on education. She continued to publish as A. or Ann Fisher after her marriage (age 32) to the printer Thomas Slack (age 28), and throughout their personal and professional partnership of more than a quarter of a century in a Newcastle printing house. There were even circumstances where a husband would take his wife’s surname, if her wealth was substantially larger than his.

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Also on 'more complicated' about women's status in Teh Past: “To wring the widow from her customed right”: the debate about the ‘widow franchise’ in nineteenth-century Britain:

Women’s suffrage campaigners in the 19th century argued bitterly that parliamentary and ‘judge-made’ laws had indeed deprived widows of their long-held right to the franchise. Although the same arguments applied to single women, the widow franchise was emphasised, partly because of the numbers – a substantial majority of women enfranchised by their property ownership would be widows – and partly because, in the eyes of many commentators, widows had fulfilled the designated function of women by marrying and possibly bearing children.
....
Women could, however, vote in parish polls. My analysis of the polls for the election of an assistant overseer of the poor in Lichfield in 1843 and for the municipal corporation of Basingstoke in 1869 demonstrates that around 75% of women voters were widows, with the remainder unmarried. Women voters tended to be older – the average age for Basingstoke voters was 57 – but they ranged across the socio-economic spectrum.

I don't care how fit they are, this makes them sound like Terribly Poor Stuff as actual partners and parents, and one might rather be a widow: ‘I’m like a single parent for months while he trains’: the partners of fitness fanatics who are left holding the baby:

“He once did an insane 100-mile run through the night,” Julia says. “You’re supposed to do it in a relay team, but he wanted to do the whole thing himself. He collapsed at the finishing line and was in bed for two days. There was a lot of, ‘You’re a bloody legend’ from our friends. Meanwhile I had to do all the school runs and even serve him dinner in bed because he couldn’t walk downstairs for days. And when he stops drinking on New Year’s Day until the London marathon in April, it’s just tedious.”

'It was a different time': ‘A distressing scene’? The corpse in the nineteenth-century working-class home:

Chadwick argued that the English working-classes kept the body for so long for economic reasons and that as a result of living in close quarters with a corpse they picked up negative associations with death and suffered moral decline. This paper overturns this assumption by using evidence from nineteenth-century folklore collections and working-class autobiography to argue that the long-standing tradition of keeping the body in the home and rallying round to prepare it for burial held a deep significance for rural working-class people.

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I suppose all those do have some sort of connection, but I just stick this in because it sounds utterly fab - especially if you know the tunnel from South Ken Tube it must be AMAZING to emerge into this wonderland: inside the Natural History Museum’s mind-boggling new garden:

This mineral gorge makes for a striking entrance to the museum’s £25m, five-year overhaul of its gardens. Five acres of underused lawns and shrubs have been transformed into an immersive odyssey through the history of life on this planet – and a living laboratory for how it is adapting to our rapidly changing climate. Designed by architects Feilden Fowles with landscape firm J&L Gibbons, it is a captivating evolutionary stroll through deep time from the earliest mosses and liverworts, to the emergence of tree ferns and carboniferous forests, and on to the arrival of flowers, savannahs and finally woodland, surrounding a lush pond that teems with wildlife.

Reading top entry in this Ask A Manager post: 'Coworker keeps prying into my romantic life':

I’m in my mid 20s, and a coworker who has to be in at least her 60s is constantly making remarks about me having/getting a boyfriend. In one instance that happened today, I was typing something on my phone and when she saw this, asked if I was “texting my boyfriend.”

This is not at all the same thing as certain persons at My Former Workplace who were given to exhorting those of us who were known to be in Unsanctified Relationships to Get Wed, so that there could be a Workplace Jolly. This was in the days when it was any excuse for a Workplace Jolly, we had already come to the days of nostalgic sighing over those epic times by the era when I retired.

(And of course once couples were wed, I have no doubt there would be exhortations to be fruitful and multiply Before It Was Too Late....)

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Dept of nitpickery: this is pretty tangential to the topic of actual article How England’s top private schools came to own 38,000 acres of land, but I will never not be irked by this sort of generalisation: 'As Victorian women they were not rich in their own right (the Married Women’s Property Act would not come into force for another 10 years)': Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts would like a word.

Also, re the Forest School thing, is this really some new thing inherited from Scandinavia, because it resonates with stuff I have looked at in the interwar period.